Binance User Base Grew 30% This Year, Expanding Even After U.S. Legal Settlements

Crypto exchange Binance's user base grew 30% in 2023, CEO Richard Teng said Thursday, signaling strength as the world's largest cryptocurrency trading venue tries to look past November's settlement with U.S. regulators and the departure of founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao.

In Binance's end-of-year report, Teng said "net inflows have been very robust, while new users continued coming in steadily" following Zhao's guilty plea, which also saw Binance agree to pay $4.3 billion for violating U.S. banking laws.

Growth was not limited to Binance's exchange products. Binance Pay, Binance Earn and its peer-to-peer platform all saw increases. There's also strong interest from "institutional investors," according to Teng.

Overall, Binance added 40 million accounts to 170 million.

The company reported spending $213 million on compliance in 2023. It boosted its surveillance of wash trading on the exchange and NFT marketplaces, created an in-house case management system for transaction monitoring and subjected itself to a security audit, completed this month.

The expenditure was already a 35% increase from 2022, and the bill for next year will almost certainly be far larger: The exchange has agreed to pay for a U.S. government-approved compliance monitor for the next five years.

In 2023, Binance's regulatory liaison team processed nearly 60,000 requests from law-enforcement agencies globally and gave 120 training sessions.

"This organization is built to last – not years, but decades," Teng wrote.

UPDATE (Dec. 28, 17:25 UTC): Adds compliance expenditure starting in fourth paragraph.